Real Estate Trends – Hopkinton, Massachusetts

Introduction:

Welcome back again for our latest real estate market trend report. For those of you that are here for the first time what we do in these reports is examine the real estate market in a city or town in Massachusetts or New Hampshire to evaluate the current conditions. We do this by looking at the changes in three key metrics year over year for the municipality to see how the market has changed and then evaluate what those observations might mean for that market moving forward.

Market Trends in Hopkinton, MA – August 2015 and 2016:

The Hopkinton, MA market has flattened out and maybe fallen off a bit since last year. The average prices were down a lot but the median prices were down a very small amount. The days on market appear to be down a lot, but that seems to be greatly overstated. Inventory was up some with 31 sales in August of 2015 up to 39 in August 2016.

Average Listing Prices:

We will first start off by looking at the average listing price. In Hopkinton, MA the average listing price in August 2015 was $743,041. This was down to $628,423 in August 2016. This gives a very large decrease of 15.43% year over year.

Looking at the median prices we see that it was lower in 2015 but higher in 2016. For August of 2015 the median listing price for Hopkinton, MA was $659,000 and in August 2016 it was $667,815 which now actually gives a small increase of 1.34%.

Average Sale Prices:

The next thing we will be looking at is the average sale prices. The average sale price in Hopkinton, MA in August of 2015 was $745,155 and in August 2016 that was down to $616,707. That gives another large decrease of 17.24%, a bit higher than the average list price.

We see the same pattern as we did for the median list price. For August of 2015 the median sales price for Hopkinton, MA was $662,219 and in August 2016 it was $655,985 giving a miniscule decrease of 0.94%.

Prices are definitely a bit inconsistent for Hopkinton, MA this month. The range for all four metrics was fairly large going from about a 1% increase down to a 17% decline. The averages and the medians were telling totally different stories though. The averages had prices down over 15% to over 17% down. However the medians had the market as pretty much flat with the listings actually up just over 1% while the median sale price was down not even 1%. The good news for sellers is that median prices are the preferred method to evaluate real estate prices so that is where most of the weight will end up. Since the sales are more important we will conclude that prices are down but not by very much. Best guess would be to go with being pretty flat with prices down around 1%. However it might be higher than this. While the averages should get a lot less weight looking at the raw data it is clear that while the middle of the market stayed pretty much the same the extremes definitely did not stay static. In this case we see why the average went down so much because the top 3 sales were in 2015 and the lowest 6, as well as the lowest 12 of 14, were in 2016. So while prices might be mostly stable now it could be on the cusp of having more issues if the market keeps shifting towards the lower price demographics.

Average Days on Market:

Finally the last metric we look at are the average days on market, which is the measure of how long it takes for a property to sell in the current market. For Hopkinton, MA the average days on market in August of 2015 were 120.03 and the average days on market for August 2016 were 74.18 giving a fairly sizable 38.20% decrease.

However as we have seen many times in the past there can be a large days on market property in one year that highly skews the overall numbers. In this case there was such a property in 2015.

In 2015 there was a property with 1415 days on market; this was more than the next 7 properties combined and over 38% of the total days on market for all 31 Properties. When removed the new calculation for the remaining 30 properties gives an average days on market of 76.87.

Using the adjusted numbers we now get a small increase of 3.63%. Totally changes the conclusion that days on market were down substantially while now they are essentially flat.

Hopkinton, Massachusetts Summary:

The Hopkinton, Massachusetts real estate market is down a little since last year. The average prices were down a large amount while the median sales price was pretty much flat with just a tiny downtick. The days on market were also pretty flat.

In summary if you are looking to sell a house in Hopkinton, MA now you should expect to get about the same or maybe a little less for it than you would have gotten last year. You can also expect it to take about the same amount of time to sell compared to last year as well.